It's ‘brain gain’ for India

Sunday, 06 January 2013 06:12
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Encouraging news findings announced during Centennial Indian Science Congress.

Kolkata. A recent analysis by Elsevier, a provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, shows that India has a 0.6 per cent net inflow of scientists. Moreover, incoming scientists and short-term visiting (or transitory) scientists are significantly more productive than scientists who remain in India and scientists that leave the country.

Using Elsevier’s Scopus database, publication data was studied over a 15 year period tracking migration streams of scientists using their affiliations and hence the country they publish in. The size of the migration streams was analysed revealing that 64.1 per cent of the scientists stayed within India during the 15 year study period, 23.4 per cent were visiting (or transitory) researchers (traveling in or out of India for a period less than 2 years), 6.6 per cent moved to and 6.0 per cent left India; summing up to a net inflow of 0.6 per cent.

The level of productivity of these migration groups was measured by publication output and expressed relative to India’s country average publication output set to one. Analyses showed that incoming scientists (6.6 per cent of the total number of scientists studied) are most productive (1.38 where 1.00 is the average publication output for India), visiting or transitory scientists (23.4 per cent) are almost as productive (1.34), while outgoing scientists (6.0 per cent) are below average in productivity (0.95).

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